Half-Quantum Vortices in Thin Film of Superfluid $^3$He
Abstract
Stability of a half-quantum vortex (HQV) in superfluid He has been discussed recently by Kawakami, Tsutsumi and Machida in Phys. Rev. B {\bf 79}, 092506 (2009). We further extend this work here and consider the A phase of superfluid He confined in thin slab geometry and analyze the HQV realized in this setting. Solutions of HQV and singly quantized singular vortex are evaluated numerically by solving the Ginzburg-Landau (GL) equation and respective first critical angular velocities are obtained by employing these solutions. We show that the HQV in the A phase is stable near the boundary between the A and A phases. It is found that temperature and magnetic field must be fixed first in the stable region and subsequently the angular velocity of the system should be increased from zero to a sufficiently large value to create a HQV with sufficiently large probability. A HQV does not form if the system starts with a fixed angular velocity and subsequently the temperature is lowered down to the A phase. It is estimated that the external magnetic field with strength on the order of 1 T is required to have a sufficiently large domain in the temperature-magnetic field phase diagram to have a stable HQV.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1206.2731,
title = {Half-Quantum Vortices in Thin Film of Superfluid $^3$He},
author = {Kenji Kondo and Tetsuo Ohmi and Mikio Nakahara and Takuto Kawakami and Yasumasa Tsutsumi and Kazushige Machida},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1206.2731},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
5 pages, 5 figures